The $8.5B question: Is India’s CHIP MISSION working? | Insider takes from Mindgrove Technologies CEO

[00:02:16] Semi Conductors - Why have they captured everyone’s attention?

[00:06:01] Age of Semiconductors - What do the coming years look like for Mindgrove? 

[00:08:53] Secure IoT Chip: What kind of applications is it for?

[00:19:51] The Investor Pitch: How to get investors to invest in your company?

[00:25:00] A Global Microprocessor Company in India: Do we stand a chance of getting there?

[00:26:50] The Poetic Answer: What does an Electronics Engineer do? 

[00:37:22] The AI Impact: How does it affect an Electronics Engineer?

[00:41:05] A Job in the Semiconductor Industry: What are the requisite skills? 

[00:50:31] Electronics, Semiconductors and Startup: Shashwath’s early experiences and influences

[00:59:40] Starting a Company as a non IITian: Does it make a difference in your growth?

[01:02:55] Being a Startup Founder and a Father: How do these roles influence each other?

[00:01:28] IIT Madras

[00:01:28] The Mindgrove Technologies office is in the IIT Madras Research Park.

[00:54:37] Shashwath and Sharan had frequent meetings with Professor Kamakoti in ICSR [Office of Industrial Consultancy and Sponsored Research]

[00:02:04] Sharan Srinivas J, Professor V. Kamakoti and Neel Gala from Incore have all come on the podcast to talk about semiconductors

[01:01:51] Sharan watched Tarun Mehta driving a prototype scooter around the campus before launching Ather

[01:05:40] Shashwath refers to the picture of John F Kennedy sitting at the Resolute Desk with his children peeking out from under the desk.

[01:06:15] Srinath Ravichandran took his children to see the Agnikul rocket launch

[00:07:31] Amrut questions Shashwath on whether microchips will be available on online portals like Flipkart and Amazon

[00:07:40] Shashwath compares buying microchips online to buying a Raspberry Pi or Arduino

[00:08:04] Robu is a company that runs an online portal for engineers and engineering-related products like microchips

[00:14:34] Netrasemi in partnership with Zoho and Agrani Labs have all raised funds for building semiconductors in India

[00:15:43] Micron, Tata Group, and CG Power and Industrial Solutions Ltd are all releasing their OSATs in the market 

[00:16:03] Kaynes Semicon is the first commercial semiconductor manufacturing company coming online in India

[00:20:38] Speciale Invest, Rocketship.vc, and Peak XV are some of the investors of Mindgrove Technologies

[00:25:13] Intel and Apple were startups which later became the global companies that they are today

[00:25:35] Companies like Qualcomm and MediaTek came in to build the processors for mobile phones

[00:25:57] Motorola was a big competition to Intel in the early days

[00:47:59] Shashwath remembers seeing the Nvidia office in Bengaluru on a college visit

[00:56:25] Pravartak was just starting up when Shashwath and Sharan were thinking about building semiconductors

[01:01:14] Shashwath talks about how he admires Ather Energy for how they made an impact in the market with a product from IIT Madras

[00:08:58] SHAKTI is an open-source initiative by the Reconfigurable Intelligent Systems Engineering (RISE) group at IIT Madras to develop the first indigenous industrial-grade processor. The aims of the Shakti initiative include building an open source production-grade processor, complete systems on a chip, microprocessor development boards, and a Shakti-based software platform. 

[00:15:52] OSAT refers to Outsourced Semiconductor Assembly and Test, a critical segment of the semiconductor industry supply chain. OSAT companies are specialized third-party service providers that handle the final stages of semiconductor manufacturing after the wafer has been fabricated. 

[00:16:13] Mindgrove is a DLI award winner. The Design Linked Incentive [DLI] scheme supports startups and companies in semiconductor design and innovation. These beneficiaries are building solutions that strengthen India’s electronics ecosystem.

[00:16:23] Some of the manufacturing companies mentioned in the podcast are PLI awardees. The Production Linked Incentive [PLI] amount for the Indian semiconductor sector is INR 76,000 crore, part of a larger package to support semiconductor fabrication, display manufacturing, and chip design. This aims to boost domestic manufacturing, attract investment, and integrate India into the global electronics value chain.  

[00:39:59] VLSI [Very-Large-Scale-Integration] is the process of creating an integrated circuit (IC) by combining millions or billions of MOS transistors onto a single chip. It began in the 1970s when MOS [Metal Oxide Semiconductor] integrated circuit chips were developed and then widely adopted, enabling complex semiconductor and telecommunications technologies. Examples are Microprocessors and memory chips. 

[00:55:11] FPGA [Field Programmable Gate Array] is a type of configurable integrated circuit that can be repeatedly programmed after manufacturing. FPGAs are a subset of logic devices referred to as programmable logic devices. They consist of a grid-connected array of programmable logic blocks that can be configured “in-the-field” to interconnect with other logic blocks to perform various digital functions